Abstract
Peer-to-Peer based streaming service has been widely addressed in recent years because of its low cost and easy deployment. Most existing streaming systems employ application layer multicast trees as the underlying infrastructure. However, the high bandwidth requirement in streaming applications leads to potential bottlenecks in the tree-based topology. Moreover, VCR-like operations further complicates the implementation of the tree-based systems. In this paper, we proposed a novel P2P architecture based on a hierarchical meshed topology, called HMVOD. Meshed topology effectively lightens the bandwidth-leak problem and increases the system capacity. Meanwhile, HMVOD maintains a directory server for the hierarchical system which deals with peer dynamics and efficiently provides Video-On-Demand (VOD) streaming services. Besides, we propose fast bandwidth recovery methods for peer departure to prevent from ripply influencing on all the descendants of the leaved peers. Simulation results show that our system reduces server loads and efficiently utilizes peer bandwidth in comparison to application layer tree systems in both normal and VCR-like playback modes.